In countries across the world, there are growing numbers of men taking action to help end violence against women.
And there are growing efforts to engage men and boys in prevention efforts: as participants in education programs, as targets of social marketing campaigns, as activists and advocates, and as leaders and policy makers.
Yesterday, two things happened that made me empathize with boys and men who are drawn to the manosphere.
The first was that I had a friend – who I’ll refer by the pseudonym Hayden, for his privacy – disclose an instance of sexual harassment that happened to him in a place where he normally feels very safe.
Jan 14, 2026
Many years ago a troubling thought began rattling around in my head. What happens when an outdated patriarchal mindset meets nuclear weapons?
That question would not leave me alone. So in 2007 I wrote a small booklet called Sustainable Masculinity. It was nothing grand, just a thin 30-page booklet exploring a simple but uncomfortable idea.
I’d realised that the old patriarchal rule book that has guided male behaviour for centuries was written long before humanity invented weapons capable of wiping out civilisation. And the two may not coexist for very long.
Growing up, telling the heroes apart from the villains was easy.
The good guys were good, and the bad guys were bad. The odds were stacked against them, but the good guys always won, and the bad guys went away.
Everything was enviably clear.
The villains and the monsters, the Voldemorts, Saurons, and evil Emperors, they were all concrete, consistent, and always separate from ourselves.
In 2019, a clip of Miami Dolphins Linebacker Jerome Baker went viral.
In this clip, he’s searching for his mother in the stands of his football game, repeatedly asking “Where is my mama?” as he scans the crowd.
Workplaces across Australia and globally need male leaders to take a gender-inclusive approach. Yes, this makes workplaces better for women. But it also improves workplaces for everybody, including men.
The tension between attention to men’s privilege, on the one hand, and men’s disadvantage, on the other, is a fundamental one in efforts to understand and work with men and boys.
Debates over how to understand men’s and boys’ social positions have been part of self-conscious attention to men and masculinities since the beginnings of this work in the early 1970s. There have been competing understandings of men’s social situations in different strands of men’s organising (pro-feminist, men’s liberation, mythopoetic, and anti-feminist), and these disagreements persist today.
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